For many years, I thought camp cooking meant hot dogs impaled on a stick and roasted until one side was black and the other still cold, or hockey-puck burgers burnt over the coals. I’m older, maybe a little wiser, and I still love to camp, but now I enjoy it for different reasons, chief among them the opportunity to cook a great meal under the starry sky. I’ve learned, with the right set-up and some pre-trip planning, camp cuisine can rival restaurant fare. Here’s how to ditch the Dinty Moore and eat well in the out of doors.
The Camp Kitchen
The centerpiece of any camp kitchen should be the chuck box. There’s good reason why this classic piece of camping gear has been around for a couple of centuries – it works. The modern chuck box can be as simple or fancy as you wish. There are pre-built boxes available from a number of outdoor manufacturers, or you can build your own. You can even just buy a plastic tote and call it your chuck box. The key is to have one place to store your stove, cookware and utensils, with the added bonus of having a work surface.
The key to a good ready-to-go chuck box is having it filled with equipment dedicated to the camp. Once it’s filled, you can grab and go with minimal packing hassles. Ideally, the chuck box should have room for your cookware, dishes, cleaning supplies, heavy-duty aluminum foil, cutting board, can opener, spatula and other utensils. You can find comprehensive checklists on-line, and it’s a good idea to tape one inside your chuck box to make sure everything is in place.
Having a consistent, reliable heating source can make or break the camp cook’s efforts. A campfire offers the romantic ideal of camp cooking, but it’s not the most practical, or even, with burn bans in place in many places, legal. Instead, a good camp stove offers reliable, even heating. While the classic green two-burner stove is still a great choice for camp cooking, newer models from Coleman and Camp Chef offer all the convenience of cooking at home.
“Modular cooking options have made camp cooking slicker and easier,” said Steve McGrath, marketing director for Camp Chef. “Take along a camp stove and build a kitchen from there, adding a griddle in the morning for pancakes and swapping it out that night to grill your favorite steaks.”
The Portable Pantry
Remember, you’re in the outdoors to enjoy it, so keep this in mind when stocking your camp’s pantry. Convenience is key, as is the ability to cook things quickly so you spend more time enjoying the fruits of your labor and less time sweating over the camp stove. Minute rice, instant potatoes and quick-cooking pasta all make great, easy additions to the camp pantry that can be eaten as a side dish, or added as thickeners to soups and stews.
Prepare as much as you can in advance of your trip and plan a menu in advance. Package dry ingredients for each recipe together and mix the liquid in the bag at camp to cut-down on clean-up. Pre-cut vegetables, cheese and other snacks at home and pack them close together in the cooler for grab-and-go convenience. You can even make whole meals ahead of time. Soups, stews and chili can all be cooked at home, frozen in plastic bags and then reheated in camp.
Meals cooked in foil pouches are camp classics and can also be prepared in advance and then cooked over the campfire. Get the kids involved and have them assemble their own pouch and label it with a black marker so everyone gets exactly what they like.
Hamburger patties topped with mushroom, onions, diced potatoes and carrots, gravy, baked beans or just about anything you can think of make great foil-pouch “hobo dinners.” Just be sure to cover the inside of the foil with non-stick spray and add a bit of butter, gravy, stock or other liquid to steam the ingredients as they cook right on the coals of the campfire.
With some pre-trip planning and a little ingenuity, camp cuisine can rival anything cooked in the home kitchen. If it can be baked, boiled, roasted or broiled at home, it can be made the same way outdoors. And no matter what your menu consists of, it always tastes better in the backcountry.